July 2024
Aya de León teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley. She is the author of ten novels, and has won the Northern California Book Award, the Jane Addams prize for social justice children’s literature, two first-place International Latino Book Awards and three first place Independent Publisher Awards. Her “Justice Hustlers” series has also been optioned for television. A former spoken word poet and hip hop theater artist, she was selected as Poet Laureate for the City of Berkeley for 2024 and 2025. Aya’s work has also appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Ebony, Guernica, Writers Digest, Bitch Magazine, VICE, The Root, Ploughshares, on Def Poetry, and in 2023 she was featured in “By the Book” in The New York Times. In spring 2022, she organized an online conference entitled Black Literature vs. the Climate Emergency (available on YouTube). In addition, she does climate organizing with the Black Hive, the climate justice formation at the Movement for Black Lives.
Special Guest Author, Agent, and Editor July 2023!
For our Go Deep retreat, we are bringing in one amazing author–of novels and memoir–for several days. She will lead the Master Class and introduce us to her agent and editor, and her books. She will go deep with us!
Jasmin Darznik is the New York Times bestselling author of three books, The Bohemians, Song of a Captive Bird, and The Good Daughter. She was born in Iran and came to the U.S. at the time of the Iranian Revolution. She holds a PhD in English from Princeton and an MFA in fiction from Bennington. She is an associate professor and chair of the MFA Program in Writing at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her forthcoming novel is American Goddess.
In whichever genre, Sandra looks for writers with something significant to say, who know how to say it in a distinctive and compelling way, and whose books help to make this a better world. Her goal is to help authors realize their dreams, supporting their work through each phase of the publishing process, so that their books reach the widest readership, here, and abroad, and in as many formats as possible. To that end, she has assembled a powerful team of colleagues, each of whom has her own list, representing a wide range of genres, each determined to make it happen for the authors they represent.
Andra Miller: I’ve worked in publishing for over twenty years, spending eighteen years at Algonquin Books/Workman Publishing, where I built a robust, diverse list of literary fiction and narrative nonfiction. I was hired to acquire literary fiction for the commercial list by Ballantine Books/Random House where I spent five years as an Executive Editor, before launching a freelance career. I live in Columbia County, New York, with my husband and two school-aged children.
Buy the Books Here & Support Sonoma County’s Local Bookstore, Copperfield’s!
MAY:
Agents:
Andy Ross
Andy Ross opened his literary agency in 2008. Prior to becoming and agent, he was the owner of the legendary Cody’s Books in Berkeley. Andy represents books in a wide range of non-fiction genres including: narrative non-fiction, science, journalism, history, popular culture, memoir, and current events . He also represents literary, commercial, upmarket women’s fiction, and YA fiction.
Authors Andy represents include: Daniel Ellsberg, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Anjanette Delgado, Elisa Kleven, Tawni Waters, Randall Platt, Mary Jo McConahay, Gerald Nachman, Paul Krassner, Milton Viorst, and Beth Hensperger.
You can read more about Andy at his website at www.andyrossagency.com and on his popular blog “Ask the Agent” at www.andyrossagency.wordpress.com.
Amy Cloughley
Amy Cloughley is an agent with Kimberley Cameron & Associates. Keeping with the agency’s unique legacy of The Reece Halsey Agency, she strives to represent the highest quality writing. Amy came to the agency with a background in editing, writing, and marketing. You can also find her coaching writers via a Writer’s Digest course designed to help authors craft and strengthen their submission materials. She is looking for literary and commercial fiction and has a special interest in mystery/suspense, near historical, and upmarket women’s fiction. She also seeks narrative nonfiction projects. You can visit her agency website at Kimberleycameron.com or follow her on Twitter @amycloughley.
Publishing Director:
Peg Alford Pursell
Peg Alford Pursell is the director of WTAW Press and of the national reading series Why There Are Words that she founded in the Bay Area in 2010. She has over 20 years of experience as an editor. Peg is the author of Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow (ELJ Editions, March 2017), a collection of hybrid prose and micro-fictions with praise from Peter Orner, Joan Silber, Margot Livesey, Antonya Nelson and others. She earned her MFA from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Visit her atwww.pegalfordpursell.com
Authors:
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s new novel, A THIN BRIGHT LINE, which the NEW YORK TIMES says “triumphs as an intimate and humane evocation of day-to-day life under inhumane circumstances,” was published in October. She’s the author of five other novels, a collection of narrative nonfiction, and a collection of short stories. Her fiction has won a Yaddo Fellowship, the 2013 Saturday Evening Post Fiction Award, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, the Sherwood Anderson Prize for Fiction, a Pushcart nomination, a California Arts Council Fellowship, an American Library Association Stonewall Award, and two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships. Her stories have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Chinese. Her next novel, THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE, will be published in 2018.
Heather Young
After a decade practicing law and another raising children, Heather Young decided to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a novelist. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is an alumnus of the Squaw Valley Writers’ Workshop, both of which helped her stop writing like a lawyer. Originally from Maryland, she now lives in Northern California with her husband and two teenagers.
Shanthi Sekaran
Shanthi Sekaran lives in Berkeley and is the author of two novels. Of her latest novel, Lucky Boy, the San Francisco Chronicle says, “With wit, empathy and a page-turning plot, the novel stirs ethical questions in the reader that the author rightly refuses to answer”. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New York Times, Canteen Magazine, Huffington Post and Best New American Voices. She’s a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and teaches writing and literature at California College of the Arts. You can find out more about her writing and events at www.shanthisekaran.com.
Creativity, Conflict and Craft Presentations:
Writing Fights and Fighting Right
In her talk, Rhona Berens, PhD, PCC will introduce the four primary styles of toxic communication–a.k.a., ways to fight “wrong”–as guidelines for crafting riveting conflicts and developing complex characters. While mastering dramatic conflict enriches writing, it undermines relationships and self-esteem. In the second part of her talk, Rhona will explore how common challenges faced by writers–e.g., procrastination, over-writing–often result from internalizing toxic conflict styles. She will share ways to turn those toxins into tools. Get ready to learn more about writing fights in service of your art and fighting right in service of your life.
Rhona is a professional coach who works with creatives, leaders and parents. She helps clients stay sane, stay real, and stay the course to their dreams. For those who seek coaching as a quick path to happiness, Rhona provides great referrals. For those who yearn to live their complex, paradoxical lives with courage, creativity and humor, Rhona’s the coach of choice. She offers empowering tools, tales and touchstones to shift self-criticism to self-acceptance, and turn obstacles into opportunities. Rhona studied at The Coaches Training Institute and The Center for Right Relationship, is accredited by The International Coach Federation, and holds a PhD in Film & Media Studies from UCLA. When she’s not coaching, or parenting her two fabulous, obstinate children, she writes slam poetry and compulsively rewrites a biographical memoir entitled, Piggyback with a Madman.
Why We Fight: Stakes, Subtext and Making Conflict Matter
Great conflict is always about basic human needs, things like safety, security, being loved and being part of a community, even being challenged. A fight about a cup of coffee can come off as lackluster and boring, unless you write it keeping in mind that the cup of coffee with cream represents freedom and autonomy to one person and to the other it represents the end of security. Using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we’ll examine how we can bust through boring scenes (or edit the ones we’ve already written) to get to great conflict supported by superb subtext.
Angie Powers teaches Story Development and Book in a Year at BookWritingWorld.com. She has an M.F.A. in English and Creative Writing from Mills College, where her novel, The Blessed, won the Amanda Davis Thesis Award, and a Certificate in Screenwriting from the Professional Programs at UCLA. The co-director and co-writer of the several shorts that premiered at Frameline, as well as the short Little Mutinies (distributed by Frameline and an official selection of the Palm Springs International Short Fest) and a quarter-finalist for the Nicholl Fellowship and at Blue Cat Screenplay Competition for the full-length screenplay of Little Mutinies. She is shooting her first feature film, Lost in the Middle, in April 2017.
Yoga/Barre Instructor
Ileana has been a mover her entire life. She has studied yoga and dance extensively. She is a teacher and practitioner of Shaivite Tantrisim. Combining her years of immersion in the practice of non dual with her love of movement, her yoga classes blend vinyasa style asana with meditation on present moment awareness and connection with source. Her movement classes are fun, sweaty, and will get your body moving and grooving.
AUGUST:
Authors:
Vanessa Hua
Vanessa Hua is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and author of DECEIT AND OTHER POSSIBILITIES, which received the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award, a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Asian American Journalists’ Association. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, FRONTLINE/World, Washington Post, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She has filed stories from China, South Korea, Panama, Burma and Ecuador. Her novel, A RIVER OF STARS, is forthcoming (Ballantine, Spring 2018).
Rebecca Lawton
Rebecca Lawton is a writer, fluvial geologist, and former Colorado River guide who has published in Aeon, Brevity, Hakai, Orion, Shenandoah, Sierra, THEMA, Undark, and many other journals. She is the author and co-author of eight books, including the San Francisco Chronicle Bay Area Bestseller Reading Water: Lessons from the River. Her writing honors include the Ellen Meloy Award for Desert Writers, a WILLA for original softcover fiction, the Waterston Desert Writing Prize, three Pushcart nominations, a Best American Science and Nature Writing nomination, and residencies at Hedgebrook, The Island Institute, and Playa. Rebecca recently completed her second novel, drafted while she was a 2014/15 Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at the University of Alberta.
Lori Ostlund
Lori Ostlund’s novel After the Parade (Scribner, 2015) was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. Her first book, a story collection entitled The Bigness of the World, won the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the 2009 California Book Award for First Fiction. Stories from it appeared in the Best American Short Stories and the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Lori has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award and a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a current finalist for the 2017 Simpson Family Literary Prize. Lori is a teacher and lives in San Francisco with her wife and cats, though she spent her formative years in Minnesota, cat-less.
AGENTS
Bonnie Solow
A former journalist and film and publishing executive, Bonnie established Solow Literary Enterprises in 1997, home of 29 New York Times bestsellers. Acting as a creative midwife, she plays a hands-on editorial role shaping and developing proposals and manuscripts for sale to publishers. As a literary manager, she goes beyond procuring book deals for her clients, taking advantage of her background in intellectual property development by leveraging opportunities to migrate her clients’ content beyond the bookshelf. She has helped broaden her clients’ reach through PBS productions, film deals and speaking engagements. She is committed to representing projects that are fresh, well written, and marketable; ones for which she feels considerable passion and that make positive contributions by expanding how people see, feel and think. Among her most recent bestsellers (2016) are The Importance of Being Little by Erika Christakis (Viking), A Mind of Your Own by Kelly Brogan, MD (Harper), and Grain Brain Whole Life Plan by David Perlmutter, MD (Little, Brown). Bonnie is a member of the Association of Authors’ Representatives and The Authors Guild.
Mary C. Moore
Mary C. Moore is a literary agent with Kimberley Cameron & Associates based in the Bay Area. She is seeking fiction, primarily fantasy, science fiction, young adult, women’s fiction, and upmarket book club fiction. Find out more at marycmoore.com and kimberleycameron.com.
Craft Talk
Peter Coyote
idney Pollack and Jean Paul Rappeneau. He is an Emmy-Award winning narrator of over 120 documentary films, including Ken Burns, National Parks, Prohibition, The West, the Dust Bowl and this year’s acclaimed The Roosevelts for which he received his second Emmy in 2015. Mr. Coyote has written a memoir of the 1960’s counter-culture called Sleeping Where I Fall which received universally excellent reviews, and is new book, The Rainman’s Third Cure: An Irregular Education, about mentors and the search for wisdom, was nominated for one of the top five books in Northern California in 2015
